At the peak of his career Frank Lloyd Wright designed a college campus in Lakeland Florida. Much of what he designed was built, and is now part of Florida Southern College. The part of his design which was constructed is public spaces; he also designed residence halls and faculty housing which was not built at the time. [In 2013 the College built a faculty house as an exhibit, but it is so far from meeting modern building code that the building permit requires that no person spend even one night in it.] I took a tour in early May 2018 which happened to be on the day before graduation - that day is the one time during the year when students (seniors only) are allowed to play in the huge fountain Wright designed.

The Wright buildings on campus are quite spectacular to see. Perhaps they were not so spectacular to use. The librarians hated the library, and a new library was built a few decades later. The church leaks a lot, and the guide told us that the bits of colored glass inserted in all the bricks fall out at a touch, so repair is constant. All the air conditioning machinery on the roof of the Science Building was added later and would have given Wright a fit if he had ever seen it. The big bank of south-facing windows you can see in the interior photo of the Arts Building were original clear glass that let in so much light that the building overheated - eventually the clear glass was replaced by smoked glass. And the technology to pump enough water into the fountain to actually create a dome of water was not available when the fountain was constructed in 1948. It sat as a big pool for a few years and then was covered with a deck which had a few small openings to see the water. Not until 2007 were the pumps and nozzles installed which create a dome up to 45 feet high as Wright envisioned.

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